Security sector reform and advancement begins in the mind. In the 21st Century, raw information and tailored intelligence (decision support) are fundamental to progress at the strategic, operational, tactical, and technical levels.

If we are to properly address intelligence governance from a comparative and international perspective rooted in an appreciation for the rule of law – appreciating the purpose and obligations of government, intelligence, and the law, we must begin with definitions.

What is intelligence? Is it anything that is secret and controlled by the government? Or is it decision-support? What is the purpose of intelligence? Is it to nurture a military-industrial complex that thrives on war while eliminating all prospects for peace? Or is it to nurture smart nations and a world brain network that create a prosperous world at peace?

What is governance? Is it a nominally-elected government controlled by banks and serving the 1%? Or is it an open, engaged, and informed hybrid network that harvests the best available knowledge from all sectors, applied in the public interest, on behalf of the 99%?

What is the threat? Is it a fictional panorama whose primary purpose is to cow society into acquiescence in the face of persistent social atrocities? Or is it, as the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change has defined, ten very specific threats, the top three of which are poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation?

What is the legal mandate, and the organizational design? Is this really to be the right to lie to the Court, as the Department of Justice has claimed, and the right to keep secret multi-level atrocities including rendition, torture, and a drone assassination program with a 2% success rate? Or is it to assemble the best truths in support of political deliberations striving to meet the needs of the greatest number? Is it a top-down mass surveillance network, or a bottom-up community-based collective intelligence network?

What are the safeguards? Are we to rely on a tiny elite who benefit financially from the intelligence-industrial complex or should all elements of the national intelligence program be subject to audit and persistent scrutiny? What individual, organizational, and national rights are to be upheld in the face of technical advance and moral retardation? Is the CIA to be allowed to wage acts of war with armed drones, and not held accountable? Is NSA to be allowed to conduct mass surveillance while undermining — actively sabotaging with back doors a teen-age can hack — the privacy and security of all civil society and corporate communications? Are corporations to be held blameless for warrantless collaboration with a state and violating all expectations of their customers?

In conclusion, we must ask: have the home country intelligence agencies of the world — and the US intelligence agencies corrupting them with off-budget funding — both reached their pinnacle of inefficiency replete with atrocities unencumbered by law? Has the time come for the public to demand not only a recasting of national intelligence, but of governance itself?

NB: It has come to our attention that some mistake all of this unclassified information about intelligence reform to mean that Robert Steele thinks it can all be done with open sources and methods. On the contrary, not only does national intelligence need an absolutely ruthless and pervasive secret counter-intelligence element to prosecute internal traitors, but it also needs both unilateral and multilateral clandestine and also both air breathing and predominantly commercial geospatial satellite as well as human-emplaced secret technical collection that is applied with precision. The “tri-fecta” of intelligence is a) to not send a spy where a schoolboy can go, b) to not waste scarce resources on technical collection that is not processed, or humans that work from official cover and go through the motions rather than being effective; and c) to not lie to the public — lies are like sand in the gears of a complex machine — they are cancerous crystals in the world brain.

Steele, Robert David. On Defense & Intelligence–The Grand Vision in Pierre Pascalon, Defense et Renseignement (Editions L’Harmattan, 1993) also in French, as presented in the French Senate to a special assembly.